Description

The files described here and included on this collection are part of a curricular unit on diffusion developed at the George Washington University by Mark Reeves, Rahul Simha, Robert Donaldson, and Carl Pearson. This is a collaboration between physics, biology, and computer science to develop material to teach quantitative skills to students in biology classes ( the Biology of Proteins BISC 183 ) and the first semester of the calculus based physics course (University Physics, Physics 21). The physics class comprises mostly engineering students, but the material described here is being developed so that it can be integrated into the premed physics course. Also, the material is taught in the week-long workshop for our REU program.

In whatever class this is taught, the material is designed for inquiry-based instruction, using the SCALE_UP methodology. As such, there are a number of components for those familiar: ponderables, tangibles, more formal lab, and written material to supplement text. Today will concentrate on the hands-on/lab portion for this workshop. This material, and full package are available and updated at the IPLS website, and soon on the WIKI that a group of us (Tim McKay, Suzanne Amador Kane, Catherine Crouch, Mark Reeves) have put together to enable the sharing of curricular material and ideas for new approaches to teaching introductory physics to life sciences students (IPLS).

The description here is necessarily brief due to time constraints and will consist only of a description of the files contained here. More detailed instructions can be found at the links above.

The diffusion unit is designed to take the students from microscopic considerations of the random thermal motion to the macroscopic manifestation of this phenomena, diffusion. Observations of Brownian motion provide the microscopic data and the random-walk model is developed as a theoretical framework to model the observations. The link between the microscopic and macroscopic is statistics. Since statistics plays an important role here, and this subject is not often well developed in introductory classes, the

These files are designed to run on mac or pc platforms. Data are collected from still images taken by a digital camera and from video captures made through the eyepiece of a microscope. Mac or PC platforms can be used, however, video capture is easier on the pc because there are more options for inexpensive frame grabbers. Once videos are in hand, then the analysis is easier on the mac or the pc but some of the software used for each is different. Any computer running this software should have java installed on it.